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Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

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Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#221

Post by mdaniel »

jawns wrote: post #143

I notice that the vast majority of comments here are lessons learned about office dynamics and interpersonal relationships. Which either indicates that soft skills are much more important than tech skills or that HN's mostly technical audience has had more to learn about soft skills than hard skills. To buck the trend, I'm going to add a few "hard skills" lessons I've learned from managers. From the best: "Every if s…

> Every if statement

... has an "else" whether it's written or not. Choose carefully whether to skip writing it, but always know it's there

I try to impress that not as much upon developers, but religiously upon folks writing requirements. Many pieces of code work just fine without the else, but the amount of bugs and rewrites due to someone either not considering "but of course it always succeeds!" or because there was an implied else scenario in their head that they just didn't bother to write down are almost innumerable.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#222

Post by mdaniel »

Aeolun wrote: post #100

My best colleague: Do not panic (I’d just brought down the production env, it was partially his company). I’m still in awe of how he carefully went through the steps to resolve the problem, not hurrying at any point in time. And it was solved in one go.

I had a piece of self-talk during outages: "don't worry, type" The more energy spent worrying, or in your story panicking, the less energy and focus available for taking action and taking action is [usually] the only way out of a mess

However, that might also go hand in hand with an "blameless post mortem" culture, because if one is trying to solve a problem and cover one's ass, now there are two problems

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#223

Post by mbrodersen »

ozim wrote: post #136
k__ wrote: post #131

Company loyality matters more than being good at your job. There is a deadline or finished software, never both. If you were a CEO once, people will hire you as CEO again, even if you were horrible. Some tasks like interviewing and writing exams are distinct skills you can learn and might have nothing to do with the actual work you're required to do in a job.

If you were CEO once good luck finding job as non CEO :)

No luck required. I didn’t have a problem finding a job after deciding not to be a CEO anymore (I was a CEO for 5+ years).

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#224

Post by mbrodersen »

BearfootCoder wrote: post #15

Best: if it's complicated, it's wrong. Worst: almost no business deliverable is one tenth as important as the people telling you to give up your time, strength and sanity in order to achieve it will tell you that it is.

I wonder why this post was downvoted? I have the same experience for 25+ years of development experience.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#225

Post by beckingz »

mmcnl wrote: post #219
cskinner wrote: post #124

Good managers are largely similar, but bad managers are each bad in their own way (with apologies to Tolstoy). From my good managers I have learnt the value of shielding working employees from excessive meetings and bureaucracy, and trusting people to work out their own solutions while assiting and supporting them. However, I have learnt so much more (direcly and indirectly) from my bad managers. A couple of examples…

Shielding is a tricky thing. Shielding is nice, less stuff to worry about, but also reduces transparency. In the end you're not working for your manager. Your manager will not use the thing that you are building. I would say that any mature organization doesn't need a manager to shield the team, the team should be able to that themselves.

Lot of immaturity out there in that case.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#226

Post by vfulco2 »

Best: Give employees the benefit of the doubt at all times and ask what you can do to help them succeed.

Worst: After hiring people, act as if they are trying to damage the franchise on a daily basis, give them very little responsibility, remind everyone the place only runs because of the boss's efforts and genius. Give juniors no path for monetary or career advancement.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#227

Post by someelephant »

avinassh wrote: post #114
quanto wrote: post #28

Best: It was a lesson I got as a fresh grad. I was losing sleep over stress from work. "This is just a job," an older colleague told me. In reality, he really did his job -- he was always on time, his code was impeccable, and he used cool logic to solve any problem. And yet, he was never too emotionally attached to work. He always welcomed criticism of his work. He had the demeanor of a cool-headed hitman finishing h…

> He always welcomed criticism of his work. What are some ways to do this effectively?

You can see from the other comments that people like prescriptive actions that anybody can take. It's a lot harder to accept that you might have some behavioral or mental issues that you need to dig into which would then make all of these behaviors natural. Forcing yourself to be a steel man is pretending. Becoming a steel man is much harder but is possible for those who willingly seek treatment. If you're willing to ask this question it means you are a good candidate for treatment. Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#228

Post by pitched »

throwaway_worst wrote: post #37

There's the common adage that sarcasm needs a "tell", otherwise people might take you seriously. A group of previous colleagues taught me you actually have to go one level deeper: Not only does your sarcasm need a tell, you need to have previously provided enough evidence that you're not actually an asshole. Otherwise, someone can be sarcastic all day, but no-one's really sure whether they're trying to be funny, or a…

Sarcasm comes out when a team is very healthy or very sick. It’s either a trust-fall game that brings everyone together or a way to ask a question without having it said in a low-trust environment. If you can’t tell if someone’s joking, that could mean they’re too scared to tell you the truth straight. Or, they trust you more than they should.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#229

Post by rramadass »

sombremesa wrote: post #188
bogle wrote: post #86

Best: in my first role, shadowing an experienced contractor, after I quietly suggested the company was a little disorganized, "Don't worry, they're all like that." Also memorable was in one of my first contract roles from another, excellent, contractor, "Spend half the day on their stuff, and half the day on your own work. You don't want to raise their expectations." To clarify that last bit of advice: a contractor s…

In my first team at a certain FAANG company, we would never schedule for more than 4 hours a day of coding per dev. Realistically that’s about the time you have thanks to meetings, code reviews, planning, other administrative activities, and working on automating parts of your job.

>we would never schedule for more than 4 hours a day of coding per dev

Exactly right; And that is on a good day!

I like to read about how the "Great Scientists/Engineers/etc." approached their work and have come to the conclusion that they all avoided "busyness" like the plague. Instead they spent a lot of time thinking about What to do and How to do it before embarking on the job itself. Dijkstra famously did everything using Pen and Paper. I am trying to cultivate similar discipline given that the amount of distractions available on a Computer is orders of magnitude more now.

Re: Ask HN: What lessons did you learn from your best or worst colleagues?

#230

Post by canada_dry »

One exec I served under - whom was both feared and loathed by peers and underlings - had one quality that I quite admired: no matter how busy he was if I needed his input on an urgent issue the moment I sat down in his office I had his undivided attention.

He didn't double-task and constantly check his computer, phone or read/sign papers. I had his full attention while I was there.

It's an attribute that stuck with me.

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